CHAPTER XX
PHILOSOPHERS WITHOUT REALIZING THE FACT
THE next evening, Quentin, whose nebulous and Anglomaniacal fever had already quieted down, went to sup at the Café del Recreo.
María Lucena, with her mother and a chorus girl friend were waiting for him.
“Well, you’re pretty late,” said María Lucena as she saw him enter the café.
Quentin shrugged his shoulders, sat down and called the waiter.
María Lucena was the daughter of a farm operator near Cordova. She had little voice, but a great deal of grace in her singing and dancing; a strong pair of hips that oscillated with a quivering motion as she walked, a pale, vague-looking face; and a pair of black, shining eyes. María Lucena married a prompter, who after three or four months of wedded life, considered it natural and logical that he should live on his wife; but she broke up the combination by throwing him out of the house.
The girl who accompanied María Lucena in the café was a chorus girl of the type that soon stand out from their sisters and begin to take small parts. She was a small woman, with very lively black eyes, a thin nose, a mouth with a mocking smile that lifted the commissures of her lips upward, and black hair adorned with two red carnations.
The old woman with them was María’s mother; fat, wrinkled, and covered with moles, with a lively but suspicious look in her eyes.
Quentin began to eat supper with the women. His melancholy fit of blues of the day before had left him, but he looked sad for dignity’s sake, and because it was consistent with his character.
María Lucena, who had noticed Quentin’s abstraction, glanced at him from time to time attentively.